Living Between Visions
by Valieara
Summary: "And there the wicked old witch stayed for a good long time." Elphaba and Glinda, in their separate retreats from the world, stuttering around an indefinable kind of devotion their whole lives long. Spoilers for Out of Oz.


**Disclaimer: **Gregory Maguire owns everything, I own nothing; for fun, not profit; etc.

**Setting/Spoilers: **A few spoilers for _Out of Oz_. Set mostly during _Wicked, the Life and Times..._

**Notes: **I finally got a chance to read _Out of __Oz_ - and while it was excellent, while I really did like Rain, I can't imagine knowing her and loving her as well as these two women.

* * *

Mockbeggar Hall, and Glinda had been dreaming of Elphaba again, turning the ornate handles on her parlor door and extending a hand to her. A foundational longing of her soul, she'd thought the last time, and batted the thought away impatiently now. She was fifty-five and under house arrest, for God's sake; time enough for _that_ kind of salvation later.

"Did she ever come out?" Rain asked Murthy somewhere in the background.

Glinda noted how Miss Murth's eyes darted to the doors and windows before she said, "No."

"Not _yet_," Glinda hastened to soften Miss Murth's quick negation; and at the twinned looks of skepticism she found leveled at her, she resolved to keep to her place in the future, which seemed to be less disconcerting for all involved.

.

From time to time, Fae found herself kneeling as if in deference or supplication to an ikon of Saint Glinda in the devotional chapel. Fae was not very good at lying to herself – not yet – and thus made every effort to never dwell too long on her position here, her aching knees, her watering eyes. The sting of the incense was brutal in her lungs.

Before her, Saint Glinda looked heavenward in ecstasy as she gripped the hilt of the sword that had been plunged through her naked breast. The spurting blood, the heavenly light – the angles were just so, complementary in their gory juxtaposition. Essence of divinity meets essence of woman. How grotesque.

It was strange, Fae supposed, that she should return here again and again when she had never taken a patron saint in any of her younger lives, not even the saint she was named for, who, according to the stories, was still holed up behind her metamorphic waterfall.

(_And did she ever come out? _Nessa asked Frex when she was very small, while Elphaba hid behind the stove. Melena, belly huge with Shell, sent her the barest of smiles over the mush and leaves she was stirring, but Elphaba knew it to be a rare true thing, and hid it in her memory.

_Not yet, _said Frex to Nessa, and so it was.

_Perhaps she doesn't want to be found, _Melena then whispered down to her so that Father and Nessa wouldn't hear, and Elphaba nodded silently. So it was.)

The woman in the altarpiece did not look at her, did not smile at her. Instead she choked on her own blood for the barest hint of admiration from her disciples.

And here she knelt.

.

In the early days, Glinda bustled into room twenty-two in Crage Hall and tried to brush the cold off her person. Elphaba, silly thing, was shivering by the window where she watched the first snow falling in nothing more than a shift and shawl.

Her green skin seemed to glow from some inner source elusively located just underneath the dermis. Glinda, after all this time, was only just starting to get used to it, and she stared for a moment – not as she once would have, for the sake of malicious curiosity and idle gossip, but simply because it was beautiful, and Glinda fancied she knew something about beauty.

Elphaba jumped slightly when Glinda called her name a little sternly, and Glinda smiled to see it. "Come dress in warmer things, at least; you'll catch cold as you are now," she said.

Elphaba smirked, but didn't respond, turning her attention back to the scene outside the window. Glinda took a minute to stoke the fire before she stood behind her, feeling Elphaba instinctively lean back into the new pocket of warmth between them. Glinda's hands came up to rest on the top of Elphie's head before she caught herself – Elphie was often so very particular about being touched. But she leaned into that contact too, just enough so that Glinda didn't move.

"Our friends are a singular sort," Elphaba finally said.

"Miss Elphie, you darling hypocrite. _You're _a singular sort," Glinda said, laughing slightly at her roommate's statement.

"Precisely," Elphaba replied, but did not elaborate. "And you," she continued. "You're flighty, ridiculous, and vain."

Glinda stiffened slightly at the accusation, but she refused to move. "If you're quite through," she said, somewhat frostily.

"Aloud, quite," Elphaba replied, seeming suddenly weary. She craned her neck back to look directly up at Glinda, and Glinda's displaced hands tumbled restlessly over her cranium to fidget in the air. "Why are you here?" Elphaba asked instead.

Glinda said, "You're arrogant, rude, and ridiculous."

"That wasn't an answer."

"Perhaps it wasn't intended as one," Glinda sang. Elphaba's eyes narrowed. Well, she'd deserved that bit of punishment.

"I do hope, in any case, that our friendship is not based in our shared property of ridiculousness," Elphaba said. "I noticed that you failed to deny the allegations."

"As did you."

"Well then, Lurline help us. I suppose there are worse things to serve as a base for a relationship."

"Just so," Glinda teased her, adding a quiet "Miss Elphaba the Ridiculous" just for good measure.

"Just so," Elphaba echoed, a small smile playing her lips.

.

It was an odd thing, to be sure, that when Elphie brought herself to think on Glinda – and such instances occurred more often than she would ever bring herself to admit – the girl manifested herself as something between a feeling and an image. She closed her eyes, kneeling here in the chest-high grass somewhere in the no man's land between the Emerald City and Kiamo Ko, and was swallowed whole by them, green subsumed into green as if self into self. She might die here and no one would find her. Oatsie and the rest of the caravan were lost to her senses, and there was only the buzz of wind and silence. But still Elphie imagined she could feel phantom hands alighting tenderly on her head, as if in blessing or benediction, and she trembled before she could help it.

She considered and then decided against sending a note for Glinda, or Lady Whoever-She-Was-Now, back with Oatsie, not knowing how it would be received, not knowing what to say.

.

_And did she ever come out? _Nor asked Sarima while the Witch eavesdropped.

_Not yet, _Sarima replied, her gaze fixed squarely on the Witch.

.

"Miss Glinda of the Arduennas!" the Witch cried at seeing her approach from a distance – for so she was, even her fashion sense had taken a hit. What a dress, and how ugly, not at all up to Glinda's usual standards.

How great her mind's comprehension of Glinda these long years; and how silly and vain she had always been. The latter had always been so easy to forget when it was not immediately before her, as it was now in gaudy salmon chiffon.

Their pleasantries were peculiar in that they seemed to assume that they had last seen each other just last week and not twenty years ago. For her part, the Witch was glad she wouldn't be forced to give an account of her whereabouts these last twenty years as she had believed she would.

She did, however, bring up Fiyero; and the web surrounding Fiyero's life and death had consumed the greater part of those last twenty years for her. Glinda deflected and demurred with exactly the wrong responses, and pointed out the grandeur of the architecture crumbling to ruins at their very feet.

Inexplicably, the Witch was reminded of the shadows of the mauntery chancery as she attended to the day-to-day monotonies of the mauntery's business. Sister Saint Aelphaba had never felt so small and so frustrated as she did in those moments, imprisoned by the same walls she'd entered for sanctuary in an eternal attempt to deconstruct the dichotomy before her: human fallibility caught up in existential grandiosity.

She'd wanted to scream and make no sound. She'd wanted to tear out her hair. Any conclusion seemed unreachable, beyond her mortal comprehension. It was the seeming, she thought; only the seeming. All mortals, we.

"They won't make your father love you any better," Glinda said of Nessa's shoes, and something in the Witch revolted at the inherent incongruity of _that_ tone matched to _that_ woman. There before her eyes, the Witch saw a doubling: Glinda superimposed onto Glinda, past onto present, and all the girl had never fully realized she understood hanging thick and concentrated in the time between the two.

"I want those _shoes_," the Witch snarled, because what else was there left for her to want?

.

And when it came, her screams struggling out of her throat, the water falling over her skin, an unexpected rainbow refracting in the drops she could count in this endless moment, one by one by one by one –

When it came, no one would ever know how water was such a revelatory thing, for here was she, and there was the girl called Dorothy, and nothing but a graceful, scalding fall of water between them. Nothing but a fall of water and all the worlds behind it and beyond it.

_Oh, can she come out_? the Witch may have dreamed Dorothy asking her through this indescribable, ineffable haze, guiltily twisting her gingham dress in her hands. It might have been real. It might have happened, those seconds spinning and stretching into gossamer days. She might be alive. Whatever else this was, it was existence.

_What an interesting question, _Elphaba might have answered Galinda from her dorm bed, pleased and amused at having engaged her roommate in matters she was clearly well suited to debate and discuss, however she liked to pretend she was made of less substantial stuff. Everything was bright and weightless in this moment. Pain and pain and pain, and everything that pain was not. A crease between Galinda's eyes, indicating she was about to give up the game.

(And how new and ancient it all was, when it came.)

At great length, Elphaba-Elphie-Fabala-Fae replied, _So what if she can?_

_._

"Is 'Galinda' a derivative of 'Glinda,' or vice versa?" Elphaba asked Glinda once.

"The former," Glinda confirmed. "It's used more in the Gillikin countryside than anywhere else. You're asking because of Saint Glinda?"

"Yes. Were you named for her?"

Glinda shrugged, and sat opposite Elphaba on her own bed. "However the trend of Unionism proper fares in Oz at the moment, it's still the custom to name children after saints in the Pertha Hills. I've always been a bit surprised that your parents continued that tradition with you, and not Nessa."

"Nor Shell," Elphaba acknowledged. "There's really no need to point out the ironies of my life to me, Glinda."

"I wasn't trying to," Glinda said honestly. "In any case, your name entirely suits you."

Elphaba snorted. "Because of the mythical woman from whom I inherited it?"

"You say 'inherit' as though she's bequeathed you it," Glinda pointed out. "And yes, in some ways: there is something that separates you from the rest of us. I often feel as though you're in constant retreat from the world. Ensconced behind a waterfall imbued with temporal properties or not."

"And shall I emerge a thousand years from now, unaged and verdigrisian, when you have all gone?"

Glinda's expression flickered, but Elphaba, try as she might, for once could not decipher it.

"Oh Elphie," was all she said, "perhaps you will."

("Far more noble than choking on one's own blood, anyway," Glinda said later that evening of Saint Aelphaba. "How wholly undignified, for the very thing that runs life through your veins to cut off the life in your lungs. How… _duplicitous. _And in one's own body. I do hate that 's better to have mystery about the whole thing and head off the notion of death altogether.")

.

_Has she ever come out? _the boy, Liir, asked Sister Apothecaire, still learning the rules of this story. The high vaulting of the cloister chapel at Saint Glinda of the Shale Shadows loomed over them, while Sister Saint Aelphaba pretended not to listen from within the chancery.

_Not yet_, said Sister Apothecaire. _Now go bother someone else._

_._

Southstairs, and Glinda thought she must be nearing seventy. (Time passed so strangely here; it was hard to know for certain.) It was a decent age to have reached even if she couldn't see worth a damn.

So Ozma had returned; and so had Rain, seeming so like Elphaba; and so Glinda had been forced into retreat. A hysterical retreat from the world, is that what Elphie had once accused her of? Schoolgirl politics seemed such a lifetime ago, though in actuality they hadn't changed much into middle- and old-age; but then, it was the seeming itself that made one's former self nearly unreachable.

There had been no choice in the matter of acceding to come here, though Rain had been a dear to argue on her behalf. She'd made her own choices to get here, and she thought Elphaba would be proud, anyway. For if she still thought about how she'd ever craved the pride of that terrifying, that infuriating, that dear ridiculous girl, she could still feel the desperate rush of blood in her brain, the brusque warm press of Elphaba's lips against hers, Elphaba's whispered entreaty: _Hold out – if you can. _

_And so I've managed to fulfill at least one promise to you, if a little late, _Glinda thought, feeling her age collect cake-like in her pores and wrinkles and the creases of her eyelids. _So don't continue to hate me as you did in your death._

She hadn't earned anything, even so, and so she didn't expect anything. Yet when the lock turned in the door to her cell one day, she smiled, because _someone _at least had been listening to her prayers these long years.

"You wicked thing," she called to her friend, verdigrisian and unaged and emergent at last. "You took your own sweet time, of course."

She couldn't see worth a damn, but saw Elphaba smiling wryly just the same. Just the same.

"It's time to come out," Elphie said – blessed, glorious words.

And so, taking the hand offered to her, Glinda did.

.


End file.
